I’ve always loved computer games. My Apple II screen had burn marks in it from Olympic Decathlon, Choplifter, Castle Wolfenstein, and Ultima. Recently, I’ve become addicted to several of Zynga’s games online, especially Mafia Wars (I’m level 52 – friend me on Facebook and join my Mafia) and Scramble (I think I’m better than I actually am so it’s endlessly frustrating.)
Zynga’s been cranking on their iPhone apps so most of my Scramble action is now on the iPhone. However, last night Zynga released Mafia Wars on the iPhone and it has immediately moved to third place on my “things to do on my iPhone other than email and call Amy.”
I got a note from Fred Wilson this morning that he’d beat me to the punch on posting about Mafia Wars on the iPhone. Yeah Fred – whatever – you are on the east coast and I’m on the west coast today so time was on your side. Help me neutralize the threat of Fred’s dominance in Mafia Wars by joining my iPhone Mafia – my player ID is 1901 3272 26 – recruit me for your Mafia (I’m level 5 on the iPhone already.)
I’m having a blast working with Mark Pincus on Zynga, his latest creation. Mark embodies so many things to love about an entrepreneur, including relentless energy and an endless drive to move his business forward.
So, it was with glee that I found out that Ali, Mark’s new wife (still less than a year) was working on her own startup. I figured it was good newlywed payback for Mark as he’d now have to split the “complain to spouse about pressures of creating a company” 50/50 with Ali.
Ali’s new business – One Kings Lane – launched last week. One Kings Lane is an invitation-required, online shopping destination, featuring designer home goods at exclusive prices (up to 70% off retail). It offers members privileged access to home furnishings of the highest quality at incredible value.
Daily Candy digs it. What more could you want out of life?
My friends at Highway 12 Ventures have started a blog. The gang at Highway 12 is based in Boise, ID and has built a very interesting portfolio throughout the Rocky Mountain region. Plus they are great guys.
Fortunately they put Lijit on their blog for search so I didn’t have to badger them about into using it and it made it easy for me to add them to the brand spanking new Venture Capital Bloggers Network powered by Lijit.
At Foundry Group, while we live and office in Boulder, Colorado, we invest all over the United States. In the last 18 months, we’ve invested in companies based in Seattle, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Colorado. My partners and I are regularly exploring new entrepreneurial communities, thinking about what makes them unique, and trying to figure out what makes them sustainable over the long term.
Last week, Jason took a trip to Ann Arbor, Michigan – the home of his alma mater. He spent a couple of days talking to folks throughout the university and the community about entrepreneurship. He summarized his trip in his post titled Entrepreneurship in Ann Arbor, Michigan and Mark Maynard of the University of Michigan TTO wrote a comprehensive post on Jason’s talk titled Building an Entrepreneurial Community: Lessons from Boulder, CO.
While Boulder (and Colorado) have gotten a lot of things right around building a sustainable entrepreneurial community, I believe that there is always a huge opportunity to learn and grown. As part of this, I’m co-hosting a trip to Silicon Valley for Colorado Governor Bill Ritter, Don Elliman (the head of Colorado’s Office of Economic Development), and Michael Locatis (Colorado’s CIO). We are meeting with a number of IT / software / Internet companies and a bunch of entrepreneurs throughout Silicon Valley over the next two days to discuss what is special about Silicon Valley and what we can learn from it in Colorado. I’ve been adamant that Colorado’s goal should never be “to be like Silicon Valley”, but instead we should listen and learn what works here and figure out how to apply some of the chocolaty goodness while avoiding all the traffic jams.
I believe that the future of most economic development and growth comes from entrepreneurship. Plus, it’s a ton of fun. More later.
Q109 is over. The numbers are starting to roll in. After all the gloom and doom at the end of 2008, I’m very pleased with the performance of most of the companies in our portfolio. As I mentioned the other day, some struggled, but many met or exceeded their Q109 plans, and several of them destroyed them (sandbaggers, how I love thee.)
There is nothing easy about operating a young company in any environment. It’s especially difficult in a downturn (or a recession, or whatever you want to call this.) If you haven’t managed to turn off TV news, stop reading the newspaper, and are still listening to NPR instead of the XM Chill station in the morning, you are likely continuing to get whipped around emotionally. So are the people in your company that are listening to all this crap every day.
So – do something that is always important to do, but even more so in a downturn. Overcommunicate. Especially your victories. Celebrate them. If you made your Q1 plan, make sure everyone in the company knows it. While it was likely a team effort, there were probably a few people that clearly went above and beyond in the quarter. Highlight them – not to the detriment of everyone else – but as a rallying cry for everyone for Q2. Make sure everyone in your company (and your partners, and your customers, and anyone else that matters) knows what worked and – as importantly – why it worked.
There’s an old adage that contrasts positive and negative news. The premise is that a unit of positive news is worth less than the cost of a unit of negative news. For example, consider the performance of the DJIA every day at the close of the market. Now, assign +1 of “emotion” to every day it is up and –5 of “emotion” to every day that it is down. Over the approximately 250 days per year that the stock market is open, assume the DJIA is up 125 days (+125), down 125 days (-625), and ends the year flat. Even though the DJIA is unchanged for the year, you have 500 units of negative “emotion”. Sucks, doesn’t it. Didn’t I say earlier you should stop watching TV news (that includes looking at the stock market.)
Now, apply this to your company. Everyone is getting hit all over the place with negative sentiment. When you have it, give them some positive. Remember that you need a lot more positive to counteract the negative. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be front and center with the negative – your team expects to hear the good and the bad. Just don’t forget to celebrate the victories.
One of the neat things about business is that it runs in cycles. I’ve been involved in the software business since 1985 when I started my first company. Since then, I’ve seen numerous cycles with a wide range of amplitudes. I don’t try to time any of the cycles, the peaks, or the troughs; rather I just invest and work hard all the way through each of the cycles.
Given the negative sentiment across many parts of the business universe (e.g. the NY Times headline this morning Jobless Rate Hits 8.5%; 663,000 Jobs Lost), I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the Q1 performance of many of the companies I’m an investor in. Several had record quarters, most made or beat their Q1 plan (obviously the easiest plan of the year to make since it’s usually baked near the beginning of the quarter), and a couple had extraordinary growth that surprised everyone. Some struggled, but when I look at the overall distribution of behavior across our entire portfolio, it was kind of what you’d expect from a typical economic environment versus one that is either distressed or bubbly.
This morning during my daily information consumption routine, I noticed four things that stuck out.
All of these are nice leading indicators that the exit environment for tech companies, which has been frozen for the past few quarters, is starting to thaw out. It’ll be interesting to see if this is just a warm day mid-winter or actually the beginning of spring.
Today, my partner Seth Levine, Eric Norlin, and I cooked up the idea to Pitch Brad and Seth at Glue. If you are an entrepreneur working in the area we define as Glue we’d love to spend some time with you at the Glue Conference. Here are the rules according to Eric:
If you aren’t aware of the history of the Glue Conference and the Defrag Conference, they both came out of our desire at Foundry Group to participate in focused conferences around themes that we are currently investing in (Defrag emerged from the Implicit Web theme; Glue emerged from Glue theme.) We couldn’t find any conferences like this so we decided to try to create them. We got lucky and found Eric Norlin (or – more accurately – he found us) and he has turned out to be a master at putting these types of conferences together.
Our fundamental goals were to hang out with super smart people working in these areas, help build and facilitate a community of thought leaders around the specific themes, mix it up some so that people could stretch their thinking, contribute where we can, and learn a ton. We’ve accomplished these goals, and much more, and are excited to be about to announce a new investment we are in the process of closing that came out of a relationship developed at last year’s Defrag Conference.
At the minimum, if you participate in Pitch Brad and Seth at Glue, we guarantee you focused, blunt, and thoughtful feedback. After that, who knows where it will lead!
Eric Norlin, producer of the Defrag and Glue conferences, has a phenomenal rant up today titled An Open Letter to Technology Startup Marketers. We had an email exchange the other day about how self-limiting the phrase “I’m being cautious” is. I put it in the category of “I don’t want to think so I’m just going to defer any decision and judgment, which I’ll rationalize as being cautious rather than passive.”
Eric took the idea and turned it into a nice rant. I love a good rant and Eric’s is a doozy. It starts off “There seems to be a refrain as of late amongst a great many of you, and that refrain is “caution.” You’re “cautious” about the economy. You’re taking a “wait and see” approach. I say to those of you doing this: shame on you.”
Here are a few choice lines:
“You cannot afford to take a “wait and see” approach. I mean, wait and see WHAT exactly? How the Dow performs? Where the CPI numbers come in? What the President’s approval rating is? If you think that you (sitting in your little ole startup office) will actually *know* when the economy turns, you’re being foolish. You’re not gonna know until AFTER it has already turned. In the meantime, you’d better get your butt out there and land some business. If you “wait and see,” you’ll most likely just be waiting around to see exactly what date your termination notice is gonna come on.”
and
“Now, okay, your budget has been cut by your cautious CEO — I get that. That’s cool. But I guarantee your CEO didn’t say, “go in your office, cower in fear, pray that we get a ton of inbound sales leads, but above all else be cautious and wait and see.” Nope. Your CEO probably said something like, “monitor your spend as if every dollar was your own; and make sure we’re getting the maximum bang for our buck.” Of course, this freaked you out. And you got cautious. WRONG.”
and
“Here’s what you don’t wanna be: the Celine Dion of marketing. Here’s what you do want to be: the Kid Rock of marketing. People may hate Kid Rock and his music, but they damn sure know who he is. Why? Because he’s never been cautious a single day of his life. He left the office, got out, and made himself larger than life.”
Great rant Eric. If you are in marketing in a tech startup, go read it!
I met with an entrepreneur yesterday that I hadn’t seen in a few years. I originally met with her about five years ago when she was starting her company. She’d been a very successful executive at a large company and had decided to jump into the entrepreneurial game and re-invent herself. Her business has grown nicely – and profitably – without having raised very much money.
We mostly just caught up on how things have been going (we email back and forth periodically, but it had been a while since we had met in person.) After about ten minutes, she asked if she could tell me a story about the first time we met. Always game for a good story, I said sure. It goes something like this.
I was introduced to you by someone I had met with who was a close friend of yours. He suggested that I get together with you and made an introduction. After I set up the meeting, I went online to learn more about you. After poking around for a while, I suddenly got scared – I had no idea why I was going to meet with you or why you would bother meeting with me. I didn’t want to blow my one meeting and waste your time. I told this to the person that introduced us and he said “don’t worry about it – Brad will give you 20 minutes of his undivided attention and something good will come out of it.” So I went ahead and met with you.
I was really nervous. I was uncertain what to talk about and just starting telling you about my business idea. You gave me some reactions and a few pieces of advice and as some point said “I bet you wonder why I am meeting with you.” I had no clue, said so, and you responded, “I believe in karma. When I was starting out as a first time entrepreneur a bunch of experienced people helped me, gave me advice, and just spent time with me with no particular expectations on their part, except to be helpful. I’ve never forgotten that and want to pass it on. I have no idea what will come of this conversation, but if I’m helpful to you, you can pay me back by being helpful to another first time entrepreneur after your become successful.” This has stuck with me from the very beginning of my business and I repeat it often.
This story made me smile a huge smile. I remember all of the entrepreneurs that helped me early in my career, including guys like my dad, Gene Scott, Helena and Chris Aves, Stewart Forbes, and many others. Whenever I help someone like the entrepreneur above, I’m paying others back for helping me.
Many of the great entrepreneurs I’ve met believe in this and practice it. It’s not altruistic nor is it selfless as there are huge emotional returns from watching other people – who you’ve helped early in their entrepreneurial career – be successful. If you are a multi-time entrepreneur, I encourage you to consider a daily (or weekly, or monthly – whatever works for you) karma break to help someone that is just getting started.